diff --git a/resources/recipes/economist.recipe b/resources/recipes/economist.recipe
index 01ee8e0baf..95b4a2ae05 100644
--- a/resources/recipes/economist.recipe
+++ b/resources/recipes/economist.recipe
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ from calibre.web.feeds.news import BasicNewsRecipe
 from calibre.ebooks.BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
 from calibre.ebooks.BeautifulSoup import Tag, NavigableString
 
-import mechanize, string, urllib, time, re
+import string, time, re
 
 class Economist(BasicNewsRecipe):
 
@@ -18,19 +18,19 @@ class Economist(BasicNewsRecipe):
 
     __author__ = "Kovid Goyal"
     INDEX = 'http://www.economist.com/printedition'
-    description = ('Global news and current affairs from a European perspective.'
-            ' Needs a subscription from ')+INDEX
+    description = 'Global news and current affairs from a European perspective.'
 
     oldest_article = 7.0
     cover_url = 'http://www.economist.com/images/covers/currentcoverus_large.jpg'
     remove_tags = [dict(name=['script', 'noscript', 'title', 'iframe', 'cf_floatingcontent']),
             dict(attrs={'class':['dblClkTrk', 'ec-article-info']})]
     keep_only_tags = [dict(id='ec-article-body')]
-    needs_subscription = True
+    needs_subscription = False
     no_stylesheets = True
     preprocess_regexps = [(re.compile('</html>.*', re.DOTALL),
         lambda x:'</html>')]
 
+    '''
     def get_browser(self):
         br = BasicNewsRecipe.get_browser()
         br.open('http://www.economist.com')
@@ -50,6 +50,7 @@ class Economist(BasicNewsRecipe):
                     }))
         br.open(req).read()
         return br
+    '''
 
     def parse_index(self):
         try:
diff --git a/resources/recipes/economist_free.recipe b/resources/recipes/economist_free.recipe
index 1a783521f6..321c7d29ce 100644
--- a/resources/recipes/economist_free.recipe
+++ b/resources/recipes/economist_free.recipe
@@ -7,12 +7,12 @@ from lxml import html
 
 class Economist(BasicNewsRecipe):
 
-    title = 'The Economist (free)'
+    title = 'The Economist (RSS)'
     language = 'en'
 
     __author__ = "Kovid Goyal"
     description = ('Global news and current affairs from a European perspective.'
-            ' Much slower than the subscription based version.')
+            ' Much slower than the print edition based version.')
 
     oldest_article = 7.0
     cover_url = 'http://www.economist.com/images/covers/currentcoverus_large.jpg'